and
my reception was over.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Mingled Reminiscences-I Relate a Mississippi River Steamboat
Experience.

Long before this I should have related a little experience I had on
my first journey south, when I was a fresh recruit. After leaving
Wisconsin, in the winter, a lot of us recruits were corralled at
Benton Barracks, St. Louis, and for six weeks we had a picnic. There
were about fifty of us, that belonged to the cavalry, our regiments
being down the Mississippi river, and the commanding officer of the
barracks seemed to be waiting for a chance to send us to our regiments.
I have often wondered what he waited six weeks for, when we were not
doing any duty in camp, and were making him trouble enough every day
and every night to turn his hair gray. He was a Colonel Bonneville, if I
remember right, a regular army officer of French extraction. Anyway, he
always swore at us in French. The camp was run in a slack sort of a way,
and it was easy for us to get out and go down town, or wander off into
the country, and, as we had plenty of money, and were dressed better
than soldiers in active service, we were welcome to all the saloons,
and painted old St. Louis all the colors of the rainbow, returned to the
barracks at unseasonable hours, crawled through the fence and went to
our quarters howling, waking up the old general, who invariably ordered
the provost-guard to arrest us, which the provost-guard invariably
didn't do, for some reason or other. The old colonel was fast aging,
in trying to lead a quiet life in the vicinity of "dose d-----d cavalry
regruits," and he said he "would order them all shot if they didn't
behave." Benton Barracks was the greatest place for the breeding of rats
that I ever saw. In every house there were millions of them, and at
night they were out in full force. One night our crowd of recruits,
about forty in number, had been down to St. Louis on a painting
expedition, and it was midnight when camp was reached. Every recruit had
a revolver, and it was decided that if the rats insulted us, as they
had often done before, we would shoot them. It was a beautiful moonlight
night, as still as death, and we could almost hear the snoring of the
excitable colonel in his house across the parade ground. As we came
near our barrack, a few thousand rats crossed our path, and I drew my
revolver and fired at a large one that seemed unusually impudent, and
the rest of the crowd opene